“I’m skeptical that tariffs made America great, and Hamilton was a big-gov’t liberal.”
Are you skeptical of the statistics?
Northern industrialists feared the Southern slave owners would one day build factories and man them with slaves, which was probably true. They knew they could not compete with slave labor. That was the main reason the Civil War was orchestrated.
Of course that motive was hidden away by historians, and replaced with the idealistic stuff everyone chants now.
There is a reason mobile phones are made in China by American companies. Cheaper labor. Huge number of jobs that could be here.
Labor costs are a tiny component of the cost of producing a mobile phone. The biggest reason to manufacture mobile phones in Asia is that the size of the Asian consumer market is staggering. The land area you can reach within a 5-hour flight from Singapore probably has 3+ billion people living in it.
The reason mobiles are made in Asia is because 8 of the 10 biggest mobile markets in the world are partly or fully in Asia. Us and Brazil at 3 and 4 is it. With China at #1 with 1.3 billion cellphones and India at #2 with 1.1 billion US (with only 327 million cellphones) labor could be free and they still wouldn’t be building them here.
Manufacturing cellphones has NOTHING to do with labor or customer market size.
I used to engineer electronics. There was a period of time when manufacturing occurred in BOTH countries simultaneously. The only reason that was not sustained is America has BAD TARIFFS.
If you buy ANY product cheaply from a Slave country, you also become a Slave country, because mobody competes with slaves.
300 million Americans is plenty market size to build any product here and cheaply. Fact is, each population market should make their own stuff, because having a Communist China building cell phones is dangerous. They have no 1A.
The reason we build in foreign countries is Congress can skim bribes. Simple.